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You might not believe it, but that gown is so rock'n'roll

“We don’t need no education,” proclaimed Pink Floyd in their 1979 classic Another Brick in the Wall . But, actually, they did.

The group’s only number one hit summed up what seemed to be the prevailing view of most successful musicians and bands towards the education system.

What is not often publicised, however, is that the founding members of Pink Floyd met at Regent Street Polytechnic - now part of Westminster University.

The romantic rock’n’roll tale is one of friends dropping out of school to set up a band - with university experiences limited to a few campus gigs while on tour. But this is a myth, according to a survey by The Times Higher .

In fact, “gownie rock” has been on the rise since the 1960s, with universities increasingly acting as the seedbeds of emerging musical talent. Mick Jagger famously enrolled at the London School of Economics, but left after only a year. Legend has it that he told his tutor that he was forming a “skiffle” band - to which the tutor replied that he would find that there was “not much money in it”.

Brian May meanwhile was half way through a doctorate in astronomy at Imperial College London and had co-authored two research papers when he decided instead to play guitar for a new group called Queen. He teamed up with a young singer called Freddie Mercury, who had a graphic art diploma from Ealing College of Art, now part of Thames Valley University.

Art colleges in particular - many now subsumed into universities - produced many of the world’s most influential musicians, among them Eric Clapton, Ray Davies, Brian Eno and Pete Townshend.

Jarvis Cocker, Pulp’s lead singer, continued this tradition and immortalised his alma matter, Saint Martin’s College, in the 1995 song Common People . It reflected a more relaxed attitude towards higher education - albeit one that maintained working-class credentials.

Gerry Smyth, a lecturer in cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, said that while the academic roots of many pop stars were undeniable, they could be a source of embarrassment.

“There is a whole tradition of what might be called ‘gownie rock’ - middle-class boys who have the money to invest in familiarising themselves with various new trends in popular music, and the leisure time to begin developing them in new directions. In the UK we’re talking Genesis, I guess, but also perhaps Queen, Soft Cell, Coldplay etc. It’s not very ‘street’, however - rock’s rebel persona doesn’t ring very true when it’s seen to emerge from a privileged background. Remember Mick Jagger’s cockney wideboy turning to Home Counties intonation when he was done for drugs? Or John Lennon - the quintessential middle-class boy bound for higher education - who turned himself into a working-class hero?”

Our list of pop stars with university backgrounds, produced by surveying institutions and scouring the biographies of musicians, reveals that higher education is increasingly common among today’s leading music acts.

Archetypal of the modern era is Coldplay, one of the biggest bands in the world, who happily admit that they first met and jammed in the stairwells of Ramsay Hall after enrolling at University College London.

Some musicians - including Brian Cox, keyboard player for 1990s pop band D:ream - have even returned to university to become academics. Dr Cox now researches particle physics at Manchester University.